Monday, April 13, 2015

On March 12 (wow - that was 1 month ago) I went to FOSSASIA 2015 conference in Singapore. This is my first time visiting Singapore and a conference in Asia. Singapore is located very near the equator so it has quite a constant weather all around the year - which means hot, sometimes humid, and almost daily rainfall. I arrived a day earlier, so I could enjoy one day walking around and exploring Singapore, the very diverse people and food.

I stayed in Chinatown which is the place that is quite attractive for tourists as it has many bars and shops with Chinese merchandise. Really convenient after a long day to get out for a beer and relax.

Pagoda street, China town in Singapore, early in the morning

The following day the conference started. On the first day there was only one track, with various and very interesting presentations. For me the most interesting were the talks about systemd, mariadb, Firefox OS and others. I also learned that knitting machines are the next big thing after 3D printing. I'm not a hardware guy but after seeing what some people make I wish I learn more about hardware in my youth.
I was quite impressed by the talk of Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan (Singapore’s Environment Minister) about open data and why it is important for a government (transparency). After the conference there was an organised event at Labrador park, where we enjoyed the barbecue while socializing.

On the second day of the conference, there were 3 or 4 specialized tracks. I mostly hanged around the "OpenTech" track which still had very diverse talks like: web development, developing methodologies, community, computer vision, etc. Interesting.

On the last day of the conference I was presenting about LibreOffice on Android (LibreOffice on Android, a
development update). I made a quick introduction to the LibreOffice Viewer which is available in Google play, and after that in more detail about editing functionality we are working on currently and is sponsored by TDF.